Arab writer demands Bush, Cheney executions

A columnist for a leading pan-Arab newspaper is calling for the executions of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and John Bolton for the U.S. military action against radical Muslims in Iraq.

Jihad Al-Khazen, a columnist for Al-Hayat, also calls for trials for journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, and former Defense officials Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney, among others, reports the Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors media developments in the region.

Al-Hayat, with a circulation estimated at 200,000, is published in Riyadh and other cities in Saudi Arabia, as well as Beirut, New York and London.

“The administration of George W. Bush committed a war crime, but none of those involved in fabricating evidence to justify the war that they planned and implemented have been held accountable,” Al-Khazen wrote. “This is despite the fact that their war has led to the death of one million Arabs and Muslims, along with 5,000 of America’s prime in Iraq alone.”

He said justice requires “that these individuals be put on trial, and the only fair punishment is for all of them to be executed, including George W. Bush, former vice president Dick Cheney, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and officials such as Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, and John Bolton.”

“The instigators too deserve [to stand] trial, for having supported Israel at the expense of U.S. interests and all other interests. These include William Kristol, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Charles Krauthammer, and Alan Dershowitz.

“If there was any justice in this world, the war criminals from the Bush administration and around it would have been sent to in a Nazi-like concentration camp, because their crimes are almost as heinous as those of the Nazis, and their prison guards would have been chosen from the relatives of their victims in Iraq and elsewhere,” he wrote.

Al-Khazen said President Bill Clinton had been asked to attack Iraq but “was too smart.” He said Bush “exploited” the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2011, to pursue war.

He wrote that the penalty for the U.S. has included its economic turmoil.

“Today, Iraq is an Iranian colony. There is a sectarian regime in power and daily terrorism where Muslims are killed at the hands of other Muslims. This is no coincidence, but the result of an old plan,” Al-Khazen wrote. “The neoconservatives have always sought to create sedition between Muslims, and they specifically tried to build a U.S.-Shia alliance against the Sunni majority in the world and the Arab countries. The Americans establish relations with the Arabs reluctantly, and hate Iran reluctantly. They believe that supporting a minority that represents ten percent of Muslims is sufficient to distract Muslims through infighting, and help Israel dominate the resources of the Middle East.”

Al-Khazen wasn’t the only one who wrote about the war, with Abd Al-Bari Atwan, editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, saying he and other Arabs were “victims of a series of conspiracies against our countries.”

“Only now do we discover the lies that the West promoted to occupy Iraq in the name of democracy and civilization. Millions of Iraqis’ lives were lost or destroyed, the country is ruined, [and] in the grip of putative civil war, a haven for extremists and under Iranian control,” he wrote.

“At the time of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the foreign minister of a prominent Gulf state criticized me for condemning the involvement of the Arab states in the American attack on Iraq. The Gulf Cooperation Council and other Arab summits called on Saddam Hussein to commit to the U.N. resolutions and cooperate with international inspectors by destroying all weapons of mass destruction. Even if they believed that Iraq had such weapons, they were also aware that Saddam would have been unlikely to use them so long as the strategic balance between the Arabs and Israel on one hand and Arabs and Iran on the other hand was kept in place,” he wrote.

“There are calls in the U.S. and Britain to prosecute former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former U.S. President George Bush as war criminals. We demand [also] the prosecution of the Arabs and Iraqis who participated in the conspiracy against their own country,” he wrote.